Tag: billion

Avatar, the 3D epic from Terminator and Aliens helmsman James Cameron, has passed the $1 billion mark at box-office. It's one of only five flicks ever to do so and, having reached the figure in just 17 days, it means…

Lovers of large numbers and Apple shareholders will be getting together this Friday to celebrate the App Store’s 1,000,000,000th download. How does Apple know that it’ll hit a million on Friday? Maths and stuff, I assume.

If you change the date on your computer to the 24th April and visit the Apple homepage, then you’ll see a massive graphic saying: “Thanks a billion. Over 1 billion downloads in just nine months.” Or you could earlier, I can’t seem to reproduce it now, so maybe they’ve fixed the exploit that lets users display it.

It does beg the question: “WTF?”. A year ago, mobile apps were a murky world full of incompatibilities and random crashing. Apple has managed to do to the world of mobile applications what it did to MP3 players and arguably the smartphone market. It begs the question of where it’ll turn its attention to next. My guess? Tablet PCs.

Internet stat-tracker ComScore has just announced that it reckons that world internet usage topped 1 billion in December 2008, 14.9% of the estimated population of the world in July 08. Asia-Pacific, including China, sent the most users, followed by Europe, followed by North America. However, the USA comes second in the ranking by country, with the UK in fifth.

Interestingly the stats don’t include access from public computers, like Internet Cafes, or access from mobile phones. In reality, therefore, the figure’s likely to be considerably higher. 77% of the world uses Google to search, which is a massive figure, and Wikipedia is fifth in the most-viewed-websites list, with 27% of the world visiting it. Facebook sits in seventh.

The humble computer mouse has come a long way since the Sixties when it was first demonstrated, and though some believe that the advent of touchscreens and other new innovations mark the demise of it, Logitech doesn’t think so.

Today it has announced that it has shipped its billionth mouse, and is looking forward to bringing out more innovating mouse-based input devices in the future.

Logitech’s president and CEO, Gerald P Quindlen, said that the company’s MX Air and diNovo Mini hinted at what the company has in store.